Spring

“It’s been a busy couple of weeks,” says corplit trying to justify absence and lack of posts. Seems like a handy cliché to use, except that it hasn’t been so: the same puttering around, the same longing for warm weather, a somewhat weird turn for the worse in weather (euphemistically, of course; how would you characterize 30 cm of snow over two days in late April?), and a bad one-week cold. And now, it’s time to come back with renewed strength, and not only because the weather seems to be inching towards spring, but because I missed this. Oh, I wanted to come back several times: what I wouldn’t have written about the new majority female Spanish cabinet with a seven-month-pregnant minister of defense; or about the new skinny law in France that prohibits advertisers, the media, and the fashion industry from promoting extreme thinness. Well, those days, together with their hot topics are gone, but new things are still to come. Stay tuned. Or don’t, because it puts pressure on me (of course, if you really wanted to stay tuned, there was nothing I could really do about it).

The good news is that I started my dissertation. I’m not going to bore you with my quantified output, and it doesn’t really matter – what counts is that now I don’t have to stare at a blank – but full of crippling effing potential – document anymore. I can now stare at several pages of it.

I’m off to spend as much of the day as I can outside: there’s a big-shot job talk in the department this afternoon, so I can act as if I have important stuff to do, and I’m not really ignoring my work. Which I’m totally not. Honest.